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5) Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan Officers
By Ernesto Londoño and Nicholas Casey, September 8, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/americas/donald-trump-venezuela-military-coup.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

A military ceremony in Caracas, Venezuela, this month. The White House declined to answer detailed questions about talks with rebellious officers.

The Trump administration held secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela over the last year to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, according to American officials and a former Venezuelan military commander who participated in the talks.

Establishing a clandestine channel with coup plotters in Venezuela was a big gamble for Washington, given its long history of covert intervention across Latin America. Many in the region still deeply resent the United States for backing previous rebellions, coups and plots in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turning a blind eye to the abuses military regimes committed during the Cold War.

The White House, which declined to answer detailed questions about the talks, said in a statement that it was important to engage in “dialogue with all Venezuelans who demonstrate a desire for democracy” in order to “bring positive change to a country that has suffered so much under Maduro.”

But one of the Venezuelan military commanders involved in the secret talks was hardly an ideal figure to help restore democracy: He is on the American government’s own sanctions list of corrupt officials in Venezuela.

He and other members of the Venezuelan security apparatus have been accused by Washington of a wide range of serious crimes, including torturing critics, jailing hundreds of political prisoners, wounding thousands of civilians, trafficking drugs and collaborating with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

American officials eventually decided not to help the plotters, and the coup plans stalled. But the Trump administration’s willingness to meet several times with mutinous officers intent on toppling a president in the hemisphere could backfire politically.

Most Latin American leaders agree that Venezuela’s president, Mr. Maduro, is an increasingly authoritarian ruler who has effectively ruined his country’s economy, leading to extreme shortages of food and medicine. The collapse has set off an exodus of desperate Venezuelans who are spilling over borders, overwhelming their neighbors.

Even so, Mr. Maduro has long justified his grip on Venezuela by claiming that Washington imperialists are actively trying to depose him, and the secret talks could provide him with ammunition to chip away at the region’s nearly united stance against him.

“This is going to land like a bomb” in the region, said Mari Carmen Aponte, who served as the top diplomat overseeing Latin American affairs in the final months of the Obama administration.

Beyond the coup plot, Mr. Maduro’s government has already fended off several small-scale attacks, including salvos from a helicopter last year and exploding drones as he gave a speech in August. The attacks have added to the sense that the president is vulnerable.

Venezuelan military officials sought direct access to the American government during Barack Obama’s presidency, only to be rebuffed, officials said.

Then in August of last year, President Trump declared that the United States had a “military option” for Venezuela — a declaration that drew condemnation from American allies in the region but encouraged rebellious Venezuelan military officers to reach out to Washington once again.

“It was the commander in chief saying this now,” the former Venezuelan commander on the sanctions list said in an interview, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals by the Venezuelan government. “I’m not going to doubt it when this was the messenger.”

In a series of covert meetings abroad, which began last fall and continued this year, the military officers told the American government that they represented a few hundred members of the armed forces who had soured on Mr. Maduro’s authoritarianism.

The officers asked the United States to supply them with encrypted radios, citing the need to communicate securely, as they developed a plan to install a transitional government to run the country until elections could be held.

American officials did not provide material support, and the plans unraveled after a recent crackdown that led to the arrest of dozens of the plotters.

Relations between the United States and Venezuela have been strained for years. The two have not exchanged ambassadors since 2010. After Mr. Trump took office, his administration increased sanctions against top Venezuelan officials, including Mr. Maduro himself, his vice president and other top officials in the government.

The account of the clandestine meetings and the policy debates preceding them is drawn from interviews with 11 current and former American officials, as well as the former Venezuelan commander. He said at least three distinct groups within the Venezuelan military had been plotting against the Maduro government.

One established contact with the American government by approaching the United States Embassy in a European capital. When this was reported back to Washington, officials at the White House were intrigued but apprehensive. They worried that the meeting request could be a ploy to surreptitiously record an American official appearing to conspire against the Venezuelan government, officials said.

But as the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela worsened last year, American officials felt that having a clearer picture of the plans and the men who aspired to oust Mr. Maduro was worth the risk.

“After a lot of discussion, we agreed we should listen to what they had to say,” said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak about the secret talks.

The administration initially considered dispatching Juan Cruz, a veteran Central Intelligence Agency official who recently stepped down as the White House’s top Latin America policymaker. But White House lawyers said it would be more prudent to send a career diplomat instead.

The American envoy was instructed to attend the meetings “purely on listening mode,” and was not authorized to negotiate anything of substance on the spot, according to the senior administration official.

After the first meeting, which took place in the fall of 2017, the diplomat reported that the Venezuelans didn’t appear to have a detailed plan and had showed up at the encounter hoping the Americans would offer guidance or ideas, officials said.

The former Venezuelan commander said that the rebellious officers never asked for an American military intervention. “I never agreed, nor did they propose, to do a joint operation,” he said.

He claimed that he and his comrades considered striking last summer, when the government suspended the powers of the legislature and installed a new national assembly loyal to Mr. Maduro. But he said they aborted the plan, fearing it would lead to bloodshed.

They later planned to take power in March, the former officer said, but that plan leaked. Finally, the dissidents looked to the May 20 election, during which Mr. Maduro was re-elected, as a new target date. But again, word got out and the plotters held their fire.

It is unclear how many of these details the coup planners shared with the Americans. But there is no indication that Mr. Maduro knew the mutinous officers were talking to the Americans at all.

For any of the plots to have worked, the former commander said, he and his comrades believed they needed to detain Mr. Maduro and other top government figures simultaneously. To do that, he added, the rebel officers needed a way to communicate securely. They made their request during their second meeting with the American diplomat, which took place last year.

The American diplomat relayed the request to Washington, where senior officials turned it down, American officials said.

“We were frustrated,” said the former Venezuelan commander. “There was a lack of follow-through. They left me waiting.”

The American diplomat then met the coup plotters a third time early this year, but the discussions did not result in a promise of material aid or even a clear signal that Washington endorsed the rebels’ plans, according to the Venezuelan commander and several American officials.

Still, the Venezuelan plotters could view the meetings as tacit approval of their plans, argued Peter Kornbluh, a historian at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

“The United States always has an interest in gathering intelligence on potential changes of leadership in governments,” Mr. Kornbluh said. “But the mere presence of a U.S. official at such a meeting would likely be perceived as encouragement.”

In its statement, the White House called the situation in Venezuela “a threat to regional security and democracy” and said that the Trump administration would continue to strengthen a coalition of “like-minded, and right-minded, partners from Europe to Asia to the Americas to pressure the Maduro regime to restore democracy in Venezuela.”

American officials have openly discussed the possibility that Venezuela’s military could take action.

On Feb. 1, Rex W. Tillerson, who was secretary of state at the time, delivered a speech in which he said the United States had not “advocated for regime change or removal of President Maduro.” Yet, responding to a question afterward, Mr. Tillerson raised the potential for a military coup.

“When things are so bad that the military leadership realizes that it just can’t serve the citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition,” he said.

Days later, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has sought to shape the Trump administration’s approach toward Latin America, wrote a series of Twitter posts that encouraged dissident members of the Venezuelan armed forces to topple their commander in chief.

“Soldiers eat out of garbage cans & their families go hungry in Venezuela while Maduro & friends live like kings & block humanitarian aid,” Mr. Rubio wrote. He then added: “The world would support the Armed Forces in #Venezuela if they decide to protect the people & restore democracy by removing a dictator.”

In a speech in April, when he was still White House policy chief for Latin America, Mr. Cruz issued a message to the Venezuelan military. Referring to Mr. Maduro as a “madman,” Mr. Cruz said all Venezuelans should “urge the military to respect the oath they took to perform their functions. Honor your oath.”

As the crisis in Venezuela worsened in recent years, American officials debated the pros and cons of opening lines of dialogue with rebellious factions of the military.

“There were differences of opinion,” said Ms. Aponte, the former top Latin America diplomat under Mr. Obama. “There were people who had a lot of faith in the idea that they could bring about stability, help distribute food, work on practical stuff.”

But others — including Ms. Aponte — saw considerable risk in building bridges with leaders of a military that, in Washington’s assessment, has become a pillar of the cocaine trade and human rights abuses.

Roberta Jacobson, a former ambassador to Mexico who preceded Ms. Aponte as the top State Department official for Latin America policy, said that while Washington has long regarded the Venezuelan military as “widely corrupt, deeply involved in narcotics trafficking and very unsavory,” she saw merit in establishing a back channel with some of them.

“Given the broader breakdown in institutions in Venezuela, there was a feeling that — while they were not necessarily the answer — any kind of democratic resolution would have had to have the military on board,” said Ms. Jacobson, who retired from the State Department this year. “The idea of hearing from actors in those places, no matter how unsavory they may be, is integral to diplomacy.”

But whatever the rationale, holding discussions with coup plotters could set off alarms in a region with a list of infamous interventions: the Central Intelligence Agency’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro as leader of Cuba in 1961; the American-supported coup in Chile in 1973, which led to the long military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; and the Reagan administration’s covert support of right-wing rebels known as the contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

In Venezuela, a coup in 2002 briefly deposed Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. The United States knew a plot was being hatched but warned against it, according to a classified document that was later made public. The coup took place anyway and the George W. Bush administration opened a channel to the new leader. Officials then backed away from the new government after popular anger rose against the coup and countries in the region loudly denounced it. Mr. Chávez was reinstated as president.

In the latest coup plot, the number of military figures connected to the plan dwindled from a high of about 300 to 400 last year to about half that after a crackdown this year by Mr. Maduro’s government.

The former Venezuelan military officer worries that the 150 or so comrades who have been detained are probably being tortured. He lamented that the United States did not supply the mutineers with radios, which he believes could have changed the country’s history.

“I’m disappointed,” he said. “But I’m the least affected. I’m not a prisoner.”

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6)  Dallas Police Officer Kills Her Neighbor in His Apartment, Saying She Mistook It for Her Own
By Matthew Haag, September 7, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/us/dallas-police-shooting-botham-shem-jean.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

Botham Shem Jean was fatally shot inside his Dallas apartment by a police officer on Thursday night.

A Dallas police officer fatally shot a neighbor inside the man’s apartment late Thursday night, claiming that she mistook his apartment for her own and believed he was an intruder, the police said.

After completing her shift on Thursday, the officer went to her apartment building across the street from the Dallas Police Department’s headquarters shortly before 10 p.m. But the officer, who was still in police uniform, did not go to her own unit and instead tried to enter the residence of a neighbor, Botham Shem Jean. She then shot him, the authorities said.

Mr. Jean, 26, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

It was not clear how the officer, whose name has not been released, mistook where she lived or why she opened fire.

Chief U. Renee Hall of the Dallas Police Department said that investigators were seeking an arrest warrant to charge the officer with manslaughter. Chief Hall said it became clear in the beginning of the investigation that the case was not a standard officer-involved shooting.

“We were dealing with what appears to be a very unique situation,” Chief Hall said at a news conference on Friday afternoon. “Right now, there are more questions than we have answers.”

The Police Department asked the Texas Rangers, the state’s top law enforcement agency, to take over the investigation.

Chief Hall said that the officer had been questioned only when other officers responded to the shooting on Thursday night. While the officers took a blood sample from her to test for alcohol or drugs, investigators have been unable to further question her.

The chief identified the officer only as a patrol officer who is white, saying that the officer was not in custody and that she did not know her whereabouts.

Within hours of the shooting, there was an outpouring of grief for Mr. Jean from Dallas to St. Lucia, his home country in the Caribbean, as well as demands that the officer be charged in his death.

Mr. Jean was born in the Caribbean and later moved to the United States, where he graduated in 2016 from Harding University in Arkansas. He was active on campus and in student groups, including as a member of the Good News Singers, the university said on Friday. With a booming, soulful voice, Mr. Jean often led the group in songs.

Bruce McLarty, the university’s president, said on Friday that he recalled when he asked Mr. Jean in 2014 to sing a hymn at a major event at Harding, which is associated with the Churches of Christ. Mr. Jean agreed but later confessed that he had said yes without actually knowing the song.

“He called back to St. Lucia and asked his grandmother to teach him that old hymn on the phone,” Dr. McLarty said in a statement. “He shared it with us at Lectureship that night, and it was a truly special moment.”

Mr. Jean moved to Dallas after college. After an internship at the accounting firm PwC, formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, he joined the company full time in July 2016 in its Dallas offices, the company said. He was currently a risk assurance experienced associate.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” a PwC spokeswoman said in an email. “We are simply heartbroken to hear of his death.”

Mr. Jean was a member of a prominent family in St. Lucia. His mother, Allison Jean, was a senior official in St. Lucia’s Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development. A family friend said that Ms. Jean could not comment on Friday because she was receiving chemotherapy treatment.

One of Mr. Jean’s uncles is the chief executive of a regional water utility in St. Lucia, while another uncle, Earl Jean, played professional soccer in Europe and on the island’s national team.

“How can this nasty world take you away from me,” Earl Jean wrote on Facebook on Friday. “This is the worst day of my life thus far.”

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7) District Attorneys Dismantle Legacy of Tough Marijuana Enforcement
By Jan Ransom and Tyler Pager, September 7, 2018
"A New York Times investigation in May found that the primary targets of marijuana arrests in New York City are black and Hispanic people. In the past three years, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at eight times the rate of white people, and Hispanic people were arrested at five times the rate of white people. In Manhattan, those figures were even more troubling: Black people were arrested at 15 times the rate of white people."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/nyregion/nyc-marijuana-laws.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., right, the Manhattan district attorney, is expected to announce next week that his office will vacate misdemeanor marijuana warrants dating to 1978.

Even as the authorities in New York City have scaled back enforcement of marijuana laws, a legacy of tough policies remains: People are hindered from getting jobs, apartments and access to education because of decades-old marijuana convictions and outstanding warrants.

Now Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, is expected to announce next week that his office will vacate misdemeanor marijuana warrants dating to 1978. In Brooklyn, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez is going further, offering people with low-level convictions for marijuana possession the chance to have them vacated and the underlying charges dismissed.

Mr. Gonzalez’s office will also automatically vacate 3,438 open marijuana warrants stemming from summonses and is encouraging people to come forward to have misdemeanor arrest warrants cleared.

The moves are part of a national shift in how states and cities are rethinking marijuana laws. The drug has been legalized in nine states and Washington, D.C., and cities including San Francisco and San Diego are automatically clearing old misdemeanor convictions.

Both the Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorneys have stopped prosecuting the vast majority of people arrested on marijuana offenses, responding to enforcement policies that ended up targeting young black and Hispanic men.

“We must remember those who have convictions on their record based on these cases that we are no longer going to prosecute,” Mr. Gonzalez said during a news conference Friday announcing the changes. “To fail to address these past convictions would be hypocritical and would be to turn a blind eye on all the harm caused by marijuana enforcement in prior years.”

In Manhattan, where 3,042 misdemeanor marijuana warrants will be vacated, 78 percent of the defendants in those cases are black and Hispanic.

“The effect of an open warrant can be very negative,” Mr. Vance said during an interview at his office this week. “It can prevent you from getting a job. It can prevent you from going to the police to report other crimes for fear that you’re going to be picked up. If you are an immigrant, you also run the risk of deportation.

“When folks say this is crazy and New York City is going to hell in a handbasket, we are not. The city wants a rational approach to criminal justice.”

Mr. Vance said he would also like to clear certain marijuana convictions, but that would require state legislation that would allow for record expungement. Mr. Gonzalez is circumventing the legislation issue by instead vacating convictions and dismissing charges. In Brooklyn, at least 20,000 people have a low-level marijuana conviction dating to 1990.

People with certain violent felonies or sex offenses are not eligible to have their convictions vacated in Brooklyn.

Defense attorneys, elected officials and academics lauded the new initiatives, calling them “a step in the right direction.”

“The recognition is that this has to stop,” said Justine Luongo, the chief of Legal Aid’s criminal defense practice. “Marijuana is not an issue that should be criminalized.”

Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services, called Mr. Gonzalez’s decision to vacate convictions “a visionary one.”

“It will save so many of our clients from deportation, loss of student loans, loss of housing, removal of their children and other very disproportionate outcomes that make no sense,” Ms. Schreibersdorf said. “Of course, New York should legalize marijuana, but in the meantime this is an incredible opportunity for Brooklyn residents.”

In the spring, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office began declining to prosecute some cases of people who were arrested on charges of smoking marijuana in public. In Manhattan, prosecutors spent six months studying cities that have legalized marijuana and released a report in May. The purpose, Mr. Vance said, was to review what other states were doing and seize on opportunities for improvement in New York.

“The impact on individuals and communities affected marks a significant shift in the understanding of prosecutors and the job they’re doing and how they should do it,” said David M. Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “It represents another really important step in a new trajectory that the city is on with respect to criminal justice and public safety.”

A New York Times investigation in May found that the primary targets of marijuana arrests in New York City are black and Hispanic people. In the past three years, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at eight times the rate of white people, and Hispanic people were arrested at five times the rate of white people. In Manhattan, those figures were even more troubling: Black people were arrested at 15 times the rate of white people.

The following month, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the Police Department would cut down on arrests for publicly smoking by more than half and give people summonses instead, but would continue to arrest some individuals who have past arrests or convictions. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced last month that a working group will draft legislation proposing the legalization of marijuana.

When asked about the programs announced by the district attorneys in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Mr. de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice said it would review the initiatives.

It was unclear whether district attorneys in other boroughs are considering similar measures. In Staten Island, the district attorney’s office declined to comment. The Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, called for the State Legislature to decriminalize marijuana.

“Decriminalization would ensure fairness for residents of the Bronx and throughout New York State,” Ms. Clark said in a statement. “The piecemeal approach to enforcing marijuana laws county by county creates disparity and will not change the underlying fact that marijuana is still illegal.”

A spokeswoman for the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said the office would review any marijuana misdemeanor arrests that have not been dismissed. City Councilman Rory Lancman criticized Mr. Brown for not doing more.

“Every New York City resident has the right to ask their district attorney why they can’t have the same benefits as the policies in Brooklyn and Manhattan,” Mr. Lancman said, adding that in Queens the office has lagged behind in “recognizing how damaging many years of policing and prosecution have been to hundreds of thousands of residents over the years.”

A 36-year-old woman who asked to remain anonymous because she hopes to have her marijuana possession conviction dismissed said she has long dreamed of being a New York City taxi driver. She had held off applying for fear she would not get the job with a drug conviction in her past.

But after Mr. Gonzalez’s announcement, the woman, a mother of three, said she will begin to save money to pay the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s application fee. She hopes that her conviction will be vacated.

“I know I broke the law,” she said. “I became a public nuisance. I want to show the community that I changed.”

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8) New Antarctica Map Is Like ‘Putting on Glasses for the First Time and Seeing 20/20’
By Shannon Stirone, September 7, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/science/antarctica-map-rema.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

The Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in a new map made with satellites operated by a Department of Defense agency.

You may never make it to the South Pole, but you can now see Antarctica and its glaciers in unprecedented detail. 

Researchers this week announced the release of a new high resolution terrain map of the southernmost continent, called the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica, or REMA, which they say makes Antarctica the best mapped continent on Earth. 

Antarctica is the most desolate and inhospitable place on Earth and its remoteness makes monitoring changes in the fluctuations of ice and water levels difficult. Because of the warming climate, seasonal changes at Antarctica are becoming more severe, making the need to understand the loss of ice even more important.

Ian Howat, the project’s principal investigator and a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, and Paul Morin, of the University of Minnesota, used data from a constellation of polar orbiting satellites to image the frozen wastes. The satellite data was licensed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense.

Previous maps of the continent had a resolution similar to seeing the whole of Central Park from a satellite. With this new data, it is now possible to see down to the size of a car, and even smaller in some areas. The data is so complete that scientists now know the height of every feature on the continent down to a few feet. 

“If you’re someone that needs glasses to see, it’s a bit like being almost blind and putting on glasses for the first time and seeing 20/20,” said Dr. Howat.

The team used 187,585 images collected over six years to create the map. 

“Until now, we’ve had a better map of Mars than we’ve had of Antarctica,” said Dr. Howat. 

The pictures are so detailed they had to use one of the most powerful supercomputers on Earth to ingest the data. Having access to this amount of information will allow researchers to better monitor the effects of climate change on the ice.

Previous images of Antarctic terrain left much to be desired. The difference between two images from previous surface imaging on the left and the new map on the right demonstrates the difference. 

The upturned shovel feature in the bottom right is called Siple Dome. Hills like these are found all over Antarctica, their smooth surface made by accumulations of ice. The large mounds act like obstructions in this stream of glacial ice that is flowing out to the Ross ice shelf, Antarctica’s largest.

Observing snowfall, ice-growth and the rate of melt and fissures will allow scientists to monitor sea-level rise and glacial melt with more accuracy. Ice shelves bear the brunt of pressure from flowing rivers pushing against them. The faster the ice melts on the land, the more weight the ice shelf has to contain, resulting in breaks of glaciers into the sea.

Scientists who keep a close watch on large ice shelves like Larsen C, above, will now be able to study the streams of ice and stress fractures that occur between the mountains. Because of the location of Antarctica and because the rest of the year there isn’t enough sunlight at the poles for the satellites to see the land, images can only be taken from December through March, the summer season. Since the last set of data was collected, a large section of this glacier has broken off into an iceberg named A-68.

This is a large river of ice flowing between two mountains called the Glacier South of Dry Valley. Images like these will be free and accessible to scientists for their research.

Explorers and scientists stationed at Antarctica will also find the new map useful. By having such a detailed topographical map, new routes to science stations can be planned around the continent’s dangerous terrain. 

At the center of this image above are two locations called Halley V & VI. Both were British research bases. They have since had to move because the ice shelf began to break off.

“Something that’s always been a problem is knowing where the ice is and knowing how thick it is,” Dr. Howat said.

The 150 terabyte data set is the first that will allow researchers to watch the fracturing of ice shells within a three week time span, nearly tracking changes on the ice in real time. These streams are flowing into Filchner ice shelf where stress fractures can be seen forming between hills. Such fractures are often the early signs of a full break from the glacier.

Dr. Howat and Mr. Morin hope to update the map every year. With REMA it will be possible to watch icebergs forming and glaciers moving like this flow of ice at Byrd Glacier, which is the largest ice stream on Antarctica.

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8) Gov. Brown needs to speed up the review process for death row inmate Kevin Cooper
By The Times Editorial Board, September 6, 2018
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-cooper-death-penalty-20180906-story.html

Melanie Bostic of Lancaster and Michael Wharton of San Leandro, Calif., protest outside the state prison in San Quentin on Feb. 9, 2004. 

A San Bernardino jury sentenced Kevin Cooper to death three decades ago after convicting him of murdering two adults and two children and severely wounding a third child. But the jury didn’t know that the investigation into those murders was, to say the least, problematic.

Subsequent inquiries and analyses persuasively show that investigators may have planted a blood sample from Cooper on a T-shirt found near the crime scene; that they failed to test — and then lost — a pair of bloody overalls worn by another man on the day of the murders; that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from Cooper’s lawyer; and that the only eyewitness — the wounded child — initially told a hospital social worker that the attackers were three or four white men. (Cooper is black.) The victims suffered multiple slash and stab wounds from a number of weapons, more than one could reasonably expect a single perpetrator to inflict. Nevertheless, the child testified at trial that the attacker was a single man.

Cooper, though, has had an inordinate amount of trouble getting the courts to give him a fair hearing. In one appeal, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Cooper’s plea for a new hearing despite a scathing, 100-page dissent by Judge William Fletcher that dissects how the police and courts not only failed to give Cooper a fair trial, but also apparently conspired to convict him. “Kevin Cooper has now been on death row for nearly half his life,” Fletcher wrote. “In my opinion, he is probably innocent of the crimes for which the state of California is about to execute him.”

Cooper has asked Gov. Jerry Brown to order new, more sophisticated DNA tests on the shirt and other items, tests that he believes will prove once and for all that someone else committed the murders. He also wants the governor to conduct an innocence hearing to weigh those test results and, ultimately, to pardon him. Brown has asked the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, which opposes reopening the case, for a response by Oct. 11 to Cooper’s allegations before deciding whether to conduct the review.

But time is running out on Brown’s term, and chances are increasing that it could end before the review process does. If so, the next governor and his legal staff would probably have to start over, assuming they chose to address Cooper’s requests at all. That would unjustly delay yet again the search for the truth, and the possible freeing of an innocent man.

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